Documentation
Matrix Studio is a design-and-control studio for addressable-LED matrix panels. Draw straight onto a glowing on-screen grid, stir it like fluid, or run built-in animations — then stream the picture live to a real ESP32-driven panel over USB serial or Bluetooth.
How it works. The whole canvas is a WebGL “LED wall”: every pixel is drawn as a rounded, softly glowing dot on a dark grid, so the preview reads like the real panel. Everything you paint lives in a single framebuffer that the app maps onto your strip’s exact wiring — you describe the panel’s width, height and per-panel height, whether it is wired in columns or rows, whether it snakes back and forth (serpentine), and any X/Y flips, and the app computes the pixel→LED order for you. An IDENTIFY pattern marks the corners (red = top-left, green = top-right, blue = bottom-left) and sweeps left→right so you can dial in the wiring until the on-screen layout matches the hardware. When you connect, each frame is packed into a compact binary packet and pushed to the panel, while the data pin, LED count and brightness are sent as a config packet on connect and whenever you save.
Connecting to hardware. There are two paths, and the app is fully functional offline — a link only mirrors the canvas to the panel. Web Serial over USB comfortably runs 30–60 fps at high baud, while Web Bluetooth (using the Nordic UART service) tops out around 10–15 fps for a 512-LED frame. Brightness is applied on-device for power limiting — 512 LEDs at full white pull about 30 A. A matching ESP32 sketch is bundled in the app’s assets so you can flash your own controller.
How you interact:
- Draw — pick a colour and brush size, then paint on the grid; strokes interpolate into smooth lines.
- Fluid — a real-time stable-fluid mode where dragging injects colour and motion that swirls and dissipates.
- Demo — cycle through built-in animations (Rainbow, Plasma, Fire, Rain and Bounce) that you can also poke to disturb.
- Clear — wipe the grid back to black.
- Settings — set the matrix layout, wiring and flips, the ESP32 data pin and brightness, and the connection type, baud and max send rate; run IDENTIFY to verify the mapping, and SAVE to persist it all.
- Full screen — expands the canvas edge-to-edge.
Runs entirely on-device with your layout and preferences remembered between sessions. Bring your own ESP32 and addressable-LED panel to see your artwork light up for real.